Ray Kwong is a cross border business development geek and a Forbes contributing writer. He is currently facilitating talks between China and U.S. interests on such matters as clean energy economics, nanotechnology, commercial aerospace and business aviation. Previously, he was a strategic planning and marketing advisor to a number of Fortune 200 companies including Bank of America, Disney, Edison, McKesson, Sun Microsystems and Time Warner. He is also senior advisor to the USC US-China Institute and a charter member of the Asian International Business Advisory Group, established to promote bi-lateral trade between China and the U.S., most recently serving as its chair of strategic planning. While it sounds way cooler than it really is, he is also a member of the Bloomberg BusinessWeek Market Advisory Board and the McKinsey Quarterly Executive Panel. You can follow him on Twitter @raykwong. Eyeball Ray's posts from Forbes ChinaTalk. Read Ray's posts from Forbes ChinaTracker.

9/12/2011 @ 5:47PM2,406 views

US Astronaut Thinks China Can Save [Your City Name Here] From Certain Destruction

Former ISS commander Leroy Chiao says the space station is in danger of falling out of the sky.

UPDATE (9/13/11): China, if it was even ever under serious consideration, is off the hook. Russia’s space agency says it will launch the next manned Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station on November 12, according to AP, followed by more fresh crew on December 20. The ISS will not be falling out of the sky anytime soon.

No one’s talking about a fiery one-million-pound meteor the size of a football field hitting New York or Los Angeles at 25,000 mph.

But it’s a possibility nonetheless, at least in a slightly scaled-down, but no less devastating, scenario.

In an underreported story, former U.S. astronaut Leroy Chiao, a four space mission veteran, says that if events unfold as currently outlined, the International Space Station will fall out of the sky. He also says that China is the only country at this point in time in a position to help prevent that from happening. (More on that later.)

Here’s the timeline:

July 21—U.S. Space Shuttle program grounded; NASA will have to hitch rides from Russia to get astronauts to the International Space Station.

August 24—Unmanned Russian space freighter enroute to ISS goes kablooey seconds after launch. Soyuz booster is based on the same platform as those used to transport personnel to and from the ISS, prompting NASA and its international partners to delay launch of the next crew until the cause of the failure is found, fixed and tested.

August 29—NASA admits that the problem with Russia’s fleet may force the ISS to be abandoned as soon as November. Space station program manager Mike Suffredini says: “It’s not a trivial thing.” An unmanned station dramatically increases the chances of something going catastrophically wrong.

September 1—Chiao, who served as commander of the space station from October 2004 to April 2005, tells CNN that leaving the station unmanned “could be a serious problem. Large pieces would survive the re-entry and could cause significant damage upon impact with the Earth.”

September 16—Three of the six international crew members will come home despite no immediate plans to send up their replacement. The ISS will be left with a skeleton crew of three in breach of regular practice.

November 15—Approximate date that remaining three crew members will return to Earth, leaving the ISS unmanned for the first time in 11 years.

If the ISS falls out of the sky, there will be no place to hide. Apparently, there is no way to predetermine exactly, or even roughly to the hemisphere, where the ISS and the shower of tons of flaming wreckage will crash in an uncontrolled reentry until minutes before impact.*

In reference to a defunct 6.5-ton satellite that will likely re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere in late September or early October 2011, Nick Johnson, chief scientist with NASA’s Orbital Debris Program, said last Friday that the threat to the public is minimal and that statistically, the odds are good the debris will land in an ocean or some other sparsely populated area.

“Numerically, it comes out to a chance of 1 in 3,200 that one person anywhere in the world might be struck by a piece of debris,” he said.

The good folks at space.com report that an early analysis suggests that wherever the satellite hits, any surviving debris will likely scatter within an area of 500 miles in length.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t find any of that comforting.

The ISS is the world’s largest spacecraft and at 460 tons, about 70 times bigger than that incoming satellite. Whatever is burned up on reentry notwithstanding, we’re still talking about tonnage that will hit the Earth.

Enter China. Chiao advocates bringing China into the International Space Station program before the ISS turns into a $100 billion fireball. “I think (China) is the fastest route to a backup vehicle for the space station,” he said.

“China is the only other entity besides the U.S. and Russia with a human spaceflight capability,” Chiao added. “In fact, China is, at the moment, the only entity that can launch astronauts into low earth orbit.”

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Thanks for the comment. It boils down to a matter of timing. The Soyuz problem has now been identified, but needs to be tested to make sure it’s not a one-off. Spacecraft from the European Space Agency will not be ready for manned flight until next year, according to published reports.

OK, I read your piece, twice, and then I went to the CNN one, to check some exposed ‘facts’…

Are you implying that it’s possible that due to stubbornness, pride (and ultimately incapability) NASA might be considering leaving that monster alone up there? I hope the real probabilities of any kind of unsafe event happening are low… Otherwise, what would be the point of trusting NASA with that much money?;)

To be honest, I can’t even beging to think that NASA would be that irresponsible, if what Chiao has suggested is true, and possible. If so, my simple advise to NASA would be, stop being political about ‘the space’ and act, now!

Yes, NASA is making plans for that contingency. Aboard the space station, NASA astronaut Mike Fossum said that “the teams in Houston are in the preliminary stages of deciding everything from what ventilation we’re going to leave running, what lights we are going to leave on, what condition each particular experiment will be on – every tank, every valve, every hatch.”